I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companies and undertakes advisory work. For my complete disclosure statement, click here. I have a background across various industries, owning businesses in the manufacturing, property and technology sectors and make my day to day living consulting to technology vendors and customers. I cover the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. My areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Good Idea, Bad Use Of Jargon--Feedvisor Raises $6M For Its 'Algorithmic Repricing Platform'

The idea of applying analytics to day to day business decisions is an increasingly attention-grabbing direction for vendors to go. Seemingly every operation within an organization can have analysis applied to it to make it more effective – marketing, sales, finance, supply chain management – there’s a big data story to all of them.

But one area that has perhaps gotten more than its fair share of attention is the general sales and marketing area – perhaps because, in a world awash with homogeneous companies, products and services, differentiating through branding and sales approaches is one of the last vestiges of competitive differentiation. In the past months I’ve covered a myriad of vendors promising high-value insights for sales and marketing functions, companies like SalesPredict, RelateIQ and Feedvisor.

The latter vendor is today announcing a $6 million series A funding round led by Square Peg Capital which follows on from a $1.7 million seed round late last year. Feedvisor has perhaps the most buzzword heavy way of describing what it does – apparently it is the world’s first algorithmic repricing platform. What that means in real terms is that Feedvisor makes it easier for companies to set pricing in context for a range of internal and external dynamics.

Rather than using complex pricing rules, Feedvisor customers have a new way to price. Feedvisor’s self-learning algorithms analyze the competitive environment, product demand, and price elasticity function of the retailer’s products and calculate its optimum price according to the retailer’s specific business objectives. And it seems to be working – over $1 billion of inventory is run through the Feedvisor platform.

The idea of pricing which is highly attuned to the dynamic environment is a good one, but this is also where the problems arise for Feedvisor – it seems to me that pricing is as much (perhaps more) about internal factors such as supply chain and company financials as it is about external factors. This being the case it strikes me that pricing optimization should ideally be part of a core ERP system and not a third party bolt on – pricing is something which, if I was a retailer, I’d want to be delivered from within whichever system runs my business, be it Oracle, SAP or a cloud solution like NetSuite or FinancialForce.

I like what Feedvisor is doing, but am pretty adamant that it really need to be a part of a something broader. Maybe an interesting M&A opportunity? Watch this space.

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